QUIZ – 2017: Insights Current Affairs Quiz,22 August 2018

Solution: b.

With several incidents of tropical cyclones and severe weather events striking over Kerala and Karnataka coasts in the recent times, the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences is proposing to set up a Cyclone Warning Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. At present, IMD has cyclone warning centres only at Chennai, Vishakhpatnam, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The Centre will cater to the needs of the states of Kerala and Karnataka.

IMD; PIB;

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Solution: a.

These include the four places of pilgrimage and the four places of miracles.

Eight Great Places (PDF);

PIB;

Solution: b.

The IWGSC, with 2,400 members in 68 countries, is an international, collaborative consortium, established in 2005 by a group of wheat growers, plant scientists, and public and private breeders. The vision of the IWGSC is a high quality genome sequence of bread wheat that serves as a foundation for the accelerated development of improved varieties and that empowers all aspects of basic and applied wheat science.

In the news (PIB): Scientists at the Punjab Agricultural University and ICAR-National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, New Delhi, contributed to the decoding of the bread wheat genome. This project was financially supported by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.

https://www.wheatgenome.org/About;

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Solution: a.

Gwalior Fort is one of India’s largest forts; but look among the soaring cupola-topped towers, intricate carvings and colourful frescoes and you’ll find a small, 9th-Century temple carved into its solid rock face.

Chaturbhuj Temple is much like many other ancient temples in India – except that this is ground zero for zero. It’s famous for being the oldest example of zero as a written digit: carved into the temple wall is a 9th-Century inscription that includes the clearly visible number ‘270’.

Right in the centre of the image the characters “270″ stand out, surprisingly modern numerals etched in a wall of the Chaturbhuj Temple.

Dr Peter Gobets, secretary of the Netherlands-based ZerOrigIndia Foundation, or the Zero Project, which researches the origins of the zero digit, noted in an article on the invention of zero that “Mathematical zero (‘shunya’ in Sanskrit) may have arisen from the contemporaneous philosophy of emptiness or Shunyata [a Buddhist doctrine of emptying one’s mind from impressions and thoughts]”.

Image Source: Smithsonianmag.com;

BBC;

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Solution: d.

BBC: Although Gwalior has long been thought to be the site of the first occurrence of the zero written as a circle, an ancient Indian scroll called the Bhakshali manuscript, which shows a placeholder dot symbol (see bottom row, seventh character when read from right to left), was recently carbon dated to the 3rd or 4rd Centuries. It is now considered the earliest recorded occurrence of zero.

From 2017 (BBC): The Bakhshali manuscript is now believed to date from the 3rd or 4th Century, making it hundreds of years older than previously thought. It means the document, held in Oxford, has an earlier zero symbol than a temple in Gwailor, India. The zero symbol evolved from a dot used in ancient India and can be seen throughout the Bakhshali manuscript. Other ancient cultures like the Mayans and Babylonians also used zero symbols, but the dot the Bakhshali manuscript developed a hollow centre to become the symbol we use today.

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